Pilong also pointed out that PJM will continue to refine the numbers over next few weeks but that the statistics that PJM has now “provide good insight.”

He went through all unplanned outages as a percentage of ICAP (page 12), by commitment type. There were 135,106 megawatts of Capacity Performance generation and 60,772 MW of non-CP.

PJM’s goal for load forecast errors is to forecast within 3 percent of the actual load, but, Pilong said, the load forecast error spiked on Jan. 4 during the bomb cyclone storm. Pilong said many things happened over that weekend that affected human behavior and electricity usage patterns, making forecasting a challenge. Having the load spike as much as it did is rare.

Coal-fired generation was down a little bit between the two years (41 percent in 2014 vs. 37 percent in 2018), much of that due to retirements. Nuclear increased (23 percent in 2014 vs. 26 percent in 2018).

As the cold snap continued, the price of natural gas went up, which caused some of the gas plants to switch to lower-cost oil. Pilong said that generators made those decisions based on economics and PJM did not direct them to make the switch.

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